The club at the top of the map
Drive north out of Scottsdale until Pima Road runs out and tees into Cave Creek Road, turn east, and the stone walls and guardhouses start. This is Desert Mountain, the largest private golf club in the city: about 8,300 acres of high desert behind a gate, more than 2,000 homes in 35 villages, and seven golf courses spread across the foothills below the Tonto National Forest. The neighborhood guide covers the district around it; this page is about the club.
It was the second big idea of Lyle Anderson, the developer who had invented the gated golf community at Desert Highlands three years earlier. In 1986 he took over the old Carefree Ranch, hired Frank Lloyd Wright’s successor firm to draw the master plan, and hired Jack Nicklaus to build the courses. Nicklaus built six:
- Renegade (1987), the first, built with two pins on every green.
- Cochise (1988), the tournament course, home of The Tradition.
- Geronimo (1989), the canyon course that finishes on a par 3.
- Apache (1996), the gentle one.
- Chiricahua (1999), the high one.
- Outlaw (2003), the links-style one, with no houses on it.
The seventh, Seven (2019), is an 18-hole par-54 course, designed by two members rather than by Nicklaus. That makes Desert Mountain six Nicklaus courses plus one, not “seven Nicklaus courses,” whatever the listings say.
The honest part: you cannot book any of it. Desert Mountain is a member-owned private club, and the only way onto a tee is as a member’s guest. If you have that invitation, take it, and our course guides below tell you what to expect. If you don’t, the country the members bought is mostly visible from the road, and the golf without a membership note covers the desert golf you can play.
The courses, in one paragraph each
Renegade is the original, and since its 2019 renovation the longest course at the club: up to 7,933 yards from seven sets of tees, with a white and a gold pin on every hole so each one plays two ways. It is also among the more walkable. Cochise is the course with the history, 7,042 yards around water and rock outcrops, with the par-3 7th and the par-5 15th sharing an island double green; it hosted a senior major for thirteen springs. Geronimo is the club’s own pick for its most visually intimidating course: ravines, plateaus and blind shots, a gentler front nine and a hard back nine that ends on a long par 3 below the clubhouse. Apache is the forgiving one, no forced carries, wide rolling fairways and big greens. Chiricahua climbs to about 3,300 feet, with eight holes playing downhill and nine uphill, and the best views of the Valley at the club. Outlaw sits on 176 acres against the national forest with no homes on it, plays like a desert links and is the one course where walking is encouraged. Seven is 3,114 yards of par 3s, a two-and-three-quarter-hour round built around a social clubhouse.
The clubhouses and the club
Most courses have their own clubhouse, and they were built in costume. The Cochise/Geronimo Clubhouse (1990) is 52,000 square feet of Wright-inspired stone and a Western art collection. Apache (2000) is an adobe fort crossed with a Grand Canyon lodge, with a steak-and-seafood room and a piano bar. Chiricahua (2001) is a Tuscan farmhouse on a hill, home to Constantino’s and its wine tower. Outlaw (2003) is an early-1900s Arizona ranch house with the Arizona Grill. Seven (2019) is the modern one, a gastropub with bocce courts and heated patio floors. Renegade, which members remember as a double-wide trailer for years, reopened in January 2024 as a glass-and-stone clubhouse by DTJ Design. The Sonoran Clubhouse (1993) is the sports and social center, with the fitness center, spa, tennis and pickleball. The club counts ten restaurants and grills in all, about 25 miles of private trails, and The Ranch, a members’ wilderness preserve certified in 2023 as a “Quiet Conservation Area.”
Membership
Desert Mountain sells three kinds of membership: Full Golf (all seven courses), Seven Golf (the short course and the social side) and Lifestyle (everything but golf). Full golf has a waitlist. Prospects can take a temporary lifestyle membership while they wait, and some homes come with a membership that transfers to an approved buyer, which skips the line. The club does not publish its fees. The last public figures we found date from January 2011, the month after the members took over: $140,000 for an equity golf membership and $40,000 for an equity club membership. Treat those as history, not a quote, and call the membership office for current numbers.
How a visitor can see it
There are four honest ways in. A member’s invitation is the obvious one: guests play with their host, and the fee goes on the member’s account. A real estate tour, arranged through a realtor or the club’s membership office, includes the Sonoran Clubhouse and homes for sale. A championship: the club hosted the USGA’s U.S. Amateur Four-Ball in May 2026 and is scheduled to host the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball in 2029. And the road: Cave Creek Road runs along the club’s western and northern edge past the Outlaw clubhouse and into the forest, toward Bartlett Lake.
Afterwards, eat where the members’ guests eat when they are not inside. Dynamite Grille at Troon North is the closest table anyone can book; Talavera and Proof at the Four Seasons are ten minutes further. West toward Carefree, the Boulders, whose two courses take public tee times, has Palo Verde and the Spotted Donkey Cantina.
How a cattle ranch became a seven-course club
By 1985 Lyle Anderson had proved his idea once. At Desert Highlands, below Pinnacle Peak, he had sold a gated community and a private club as a single purchase, around Jack Nicklaus’s first desert course, and the first Skins Game had sold it out on television. That year he announced the same idea at ten times the scale, on the Carefree Ranch, a working cattle spread in the high desert north of the city Scottsdale had just finished annexing in the 1980s. Desert Mountain was founded in 1986, master-planned by Taliesin Associated Architects.
The courses came in a steady march. Renegade opened in 1987 with a gimmick that turned out to be a good idea: two pin positions on every green, white for the members and gold for the brave. Cochise followed in November 1988, and Geronimo on October 31, 1989. Nicklaus had meant Geronimo to be the tournament course, but when a new senior major called The Tradition came to Desert Mountain that spring, it went to Cochise, which had the room for a clubhouse and galleries. It stayed through 2001, and Nicklaus won it four times on his own course. The tournament drew around 52,000 fans in its time here, by the club’s later account. Apache arrived in 1996, Chiricahua in 1999, and Outlaw, the sixth and last Nicklaus design, in 2003, each with its own clubhouse and its own architectural costume.
The ownership was always meant to change hands. The original documents scheduled a handover to the membership “at a future determined date,” and it came at the turn of 2011, in the trough of the real estate crash, when the members’ advisory board became the board of directors and new terms took effect on January 1. (The 2008 crash took several of Anderson’s projects outside Scottsdale; Desert Mountain and Desert Highlands were separately owned and unaffected.) Under the members the club brought tour golf back: Nicklaus came in December 2011 to walk Cochise with the new board, and the Champions Tour’s season finale, the Charles Schwab Cup Championship, was played there in 2012 and from 2014 to 2016. Tom Lehman, Tom Pernice Jr., Billy Andrade and Paul Goydos won it. Then the tour moved the finale to Phoenix Country Club.
The member era has also been a rebuilding era. Seven, the par-3 course, opened in 2019, the first course built since 2003 and the first not by Nicklaus; members Bill Brownlee, a developer, and Wendell Pickett, a landscape architect, created it, with a village of up to 190 homes around it. Renegade was renovated the same year, losing its fairway mounds and most of its double greens. Cochise was rebuilt below ground and laser-restored above it, reopening in September 2024, and Geronimo got the same treatment, reopening in late September 2026. In between, in May 2026, the USGA brought the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball to Cochise and Outlaw, and Lawrence Allan and Grady Brame Jr. won it.
What we could not confirm
Two numbers that circulate about Desert Mountain are not in the sources we could reach. The price the members paid the developer at the 2010–2011 handover is widely repeated, but we did not find it in a primary source, so we have left it out. And the club’s current initiation fee is not published; anyone quoting one is quoting a membership office or a listing, and it changes with the waitlist.
Nearby
The club sits at the top of the Desert Mountain district. South is Pinnacle Peak and Troon, with the public golf at Troon North; west is Carefree, with the Boulders; and between them are the northern trailheads of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, Brown’s Ranch and Granite Mountain, where anyone can walk the same desert for nothing.